Film Reviews by CH

How many authors create a word that takes on a life of its own, uttered at any given moment by somebody most likely with no idea of its origins? In 1933 the novelist James Hilton came up with Shangri-la for a remote, peace-loving enclave amidst Tibetan mountains, a place which few seek to leave and are rewarded with a long life.

Within four years this had become a film made in Hollywood and thereabouts by Frank Capra, a director noted for his technical skill and a relish of the inspirational. To come to this fresh is to marvel. A diplomat (Ronald Colman) is among half-a-dozen passengers aboard a small aeroplane, one of the last to leave a panicking crowd in war-torn China for Shanghai – except that, with dawn, the sun is in the wrong place, they are heading in the opposite direction while the gun-wielding pilot brooks no discussion as snowy mountains go by.

Come the inevitable crash and the pilot's death, the varied passengers, including a geologist, a fraudster and a prostitute with tuberculosis, set off, to be immediately greeted by a troop who had anticipated their arrival and been deputed to bring them back to stay in Shangri-la.

More than eight decades on, the settings make one gasp more than any computer-created pixels can do. Whiter than the surrounding snow, the building – Saltdean Lido writ large - opens upon huge, book-lined rooms, the work of two centuries, its humane magnificence down to a High Lama (Sam Jaffe) whose deputy is H.B. Warner who has something of the manner of an unfazed country parson.

All of which, when the outer world is turbulent, brings the question: should one leave? Each passenger has a different take upon this, especially Colman who had been due back in Whitehall and is likely to become Foreign Secretary. That is to reckon without somebody already there: the pretty Jane Wyatt whom he follows through meadows upon a horse, loses her – and finds her swimming in a lake (after we have seen her body double dive in naked, and it is well nigh a case of lust horizon.

Fantasy, of course, but to a purpose, all of it a debate upon the meaning of life made glorious by the abundance of film techniques whose effect is never overwrought. Since 1937, the film deteriorated into many mutilated reels, some stretches elusive. The recent restoration looks splendid, and comes with well-informed commentaries, especially upon such matters as the lighting and the building of sets.

Down the years, some have scoffed, as Graham Greene did at the time; others cannot fail to be charmed, and more.

The same evening that I watched Lost Horizon, I had seen The Roots of Heaven (1958). The latter – despite being directed by John Houston with a notable cast – appears to have slipped from the collective film mind. If not the best work of any of those involved, it is more than a curiosity as, in contemporary French Equatorial Africa, Trevor Howard, with that matchless voice which can bring a moral to a phrase (The Third Man - passim), expresses similar concerns about mankind's fate to those of Ronald Colman in Shangri-la.

In particular, and presciently, Howard asserts at the outset that if human beings cannot care for other animals, our own look-out is in peril. The screen has opened with shots of elephants traversing the land, and his concern, with a petition, is to preserve these magnificent creatures from, well, shots by those who think it smart to wield a rifle.

He touts his sheets of paper around a bar which has not only sprung up in this remote territory but is staffed by none other than Juliette Gréco, whose outfits and lipstick are never besmirched by the events as she takes his side in this ecological push.

There is something to be written about the rôle of the bar in outlandish places. It brings together diverse people amidst social and political dispute. Among those with an interest in opposing or supporting Howard for their own sakes are an ever-sinister Herbert Lom and, in his last film, Errol Flynn. Their appearances, however, are as brief as that by Orson Welles, who brings a surprisingly camp turn – bouffant hair and all – to his part as an American television broadcaster. Such exception is taken to him that, in revenge, he is blasted in the buttocks by a rifle, an act which he takes in good part while the offending items are retrieved while he is prone upon a bench; what's more, back in America, he publicises his support of Howard's cause in front of the nation (and, afterwards, rises from a chair which has also contained an inflatable cushion).

All of which is to say that this is an unusual film, and such farce is not typical of it – nor is the scene at a clubhouse redolent of Empire where unseen buttocks are again to the fore, as invaders seize upon a formidable matron and remove her drawers to administer twelve firm slaps as punishment for her gloating murder of an elephant. It is all as if Bunuel had an uncredited part in proceedings.

The film derives from a novel written a couple of years earlier by Romain Gary who worked on the screenplay with the help of Patrick Leigh-Fermor (difficult to believe that elegant writer came up with the inflatable cushion). As with so many involved in this film about tangled lives, their own took various bruises: Gary later married Jean Seberg, whose death in a parked automobile he insisted was not probable suicide but an FBI killing, a persistent thought which contributed to his killing himself a few years later – by gunshot.

The great survivor was Juliette Gréco, dead last year. Those of us who relish her singing have to be content here with a few hummed bars (as it were).

The gags do not fly at the earlier rate but the jackets still look like a Ralph Lauren number upon Timothée Chalamet whose voiceover has similar intonations to those delivered in the past by Woody Allen himself. After Allen's long sojourn in Europe, with so many films which looked beholden to local tourist boards, the setting is Manhattan – but it, too, feels as if no longer a place from which creative energy springs, and perhaps that reflects the past two decades' change, one which has made it the preserve of the rich.

Well-heeled characters, funded by banking families, are to the fore. Not only Chalamet, a disenchanted student at an upstate college but his often-gauche girlfriend Elle Fanning who has just had her request accepted for an interview in a student paper with a neurotic, designer-bearded film director played by Liev Schriber whose latest work features an elegant hunk (Diego Luna). One can anticipate the entanglements as the rain pours as the young couple arrive at the Pierre (paid for by Chalamet's recent poker winnings) and plans to visit the familiar array of city nightspots such as Bemelman's Bar while the rain pours throughout.

Plots have never been Woody Allen's strong point; the films are a series of scenes, helped along by notable cinematographers (here, the work of Vitorrio Storaro brings out the interiors' many dark-hued tones which so often make one feel as is stepping from a hustling sidewalkinto a baronial hall). It could be tighter but there is much to enjoy, especially if one has a soft spot for romantic comedy which is here given an edge by Selena Gomez as the sister of Chalamet's earlier girlfriend and Cherry Jones as his mother.

Naturally one looked with curiosity at the credits to be reassured that no water was damaged in this making of this film. Gallons of it must have drained the budget while being sprayed from a series of tanker trucks (real rain, never there when you want it, does not film well). Meanwhile, in a sunnier setting, Woody Allen has returned to Spain for Rifkin's Festival, set at a film festival, where events are interrupted by a director screening in his mind re-makes of celebrated scenes by others. This could be a promising return to Allen's magical turns, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo. We should all be working at such a rate with ninety on the horizon.

What is it about classical music that brings out the enjoyably preposterous in Hollywood? One might think of John Garfield's beachside violin playing in Humoresque, but even that is restraint beside Deception (1946). Directed by Irving Rapper who, dying in 1999 at almost 102, lived long enough to find – one likes to think - his name the butt of many a musical joke far from the concert halls of this movie. It opens with Paul Henreid playing Haydn's cello concerto to acclaim in post-war America. Among the smartly-dressed audience is pianist Bette Davis, who thought that he, her lover, had died in the war. They are re-united with such passion that they decide to marry the next day. This brings a new turn to the notion that the cello is the musical equivalent of the human heartbeat.

All of which would be wonderful but for the fact that her lavish apartment, view and all, has been funded by the conductor and genius composer Hollenious (Claude Rains). Cat-stroking Rains, his hair distinctly bouffant, is outraged by this turn to events, his performance – jealousy incarnate – so much the higher camp that it is well nigh the last staging-post before the summit of Everest.

Especially when he finds that Henreid is the necessary cellist for his latest masterpiece (a work created by Korngold, who himself had fled Germany). Rapper, who had worked with all three of them on Now, Voyager, plays the situation – from a play by Louis Verneuil – for all it's (its?) worth, never shying from dramatic montage which plys close to noir inside and out as the torrid comes to the fore.

Hokum, of course, but brilliantly done, so much so that one might call it the thinking man's Amadeus.

The title Mine Own Executioner (1947) is from John Donne, and the rest of the film is scripted by Nigel Balchin from his novel which, like his The Small Back Room (filmed by Powell and Pressburger), was a successful part of the post-war literary landscape: both popular and critically acclaimed.

Quite possibly, psychiatry has never been as well depicted on screen as it is in this beautifully filmed work (the director is Anthony Kimmins, the cinematographer Wilkie Cooper). Here, in smart London premises, with an enviable curving staircase, an excellent Burgess Meredith is a psychotherapist with an ability to help young and old through the troubles they present to him – not though that he is able to smooth his own marital situation (his wife is Dulcie Gray). Nobly, he gives his time to those able to pay (some splendid cameos amidst those patients) and those who cannot do so.

Meredith is under further pressure as he is not a part of the profession itself but working at a tangent to it, a situation compounded by the arrival of the attractive Barbara White who asks help for her husband (Kieron Moore), whose behaviour has become erratic and dangerous after being taken a prisoner by the Japanese during the war.

All this takes many twists, with some noirish interiors, and owes much to Balchin who, in a varied career, had studied psychiatry. He understood the continual battle between elegant settings and tormented minds, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called those mental “cliffs of fall” - and anybody with even a hint of vertigo will cling to the arm of chair while watching some of it, even sliding forwards in terror.

Here is one of the best films ever made in England – and it should be better known. As should Balchin, a man whose own demons took him far too young.

Christopher Isherwood often remarked that if his Sally Bowles had displayed the talent of Liza Minnelli, that small Berlin club would have been the sensation of Europe. Similar suspenders of disbelief are in order at the start of Affair in Trinidad (1952), where, with bongos to the fore, Rita Hayworth performs a dance-and-song number way beyond the means of the premises' dodgy owner.

Such is her skill that to watch her from the rear brings a new meaning to the phrase back projection – a phrase which, in its filmic sense, is also apt, for all of this island sojourn was filmed in Hollywood, with automobile excursions palpably faked. No matter. After all, none of Casablanca was shot on location. So what has brought sundry

people to post-war Trinidad? Rita Hayworth is informed by a police inspector and Embassy offical that her impoverished artist husband has died that very day. Such had been their relationship that, when asked what she said to him at breakfast, she replied, “pass the salt”.

It becomes clear that foul play rather than suicide was the cause, all the more so when her brother-in-law (Glenn Ford) arrives with a letter from his brother dated the very day of his death. He and Rita Hayworth had appeared together, to great effect, in Gilda. If Affair in Trinidad does not reach that level (or depths), it is adroitly done, not least because the jealousy and confusion is fomented by the elegantly sinister presence of Alexander Scourby, who should have appeared in more films. Palpably rich, he is smitten by Rita Hayworth, an infatuation which proves the tragic flaw in his latest plan to augment a nefarious fortune. The mechanics of that need not detain us, any more than the uranium racket of Beat the Devil. As with that terrific film (in which Bogart encounters Robert Morley), the plot is but a vehicle for the barbed exchanges of the characters caught up in it all. Here is a film in which nobody, however lowly the rôle, is superfluous: to name them would make for a catalogue.

Space, though, should be found to mention the effective direction by Vincent Sherman (who almost lived to a hundred) and Oscar Saul who, with James Gunn, worked a story into a screenplay. Watch this on your own and you'll hanker to see it again – with somebody by your side. That somebody will surely say, “you're right – this should be better known.”

Time was, when Hollywood studios were not preoccupied by blockbusters, when large studios supported offbeat movies – and often found themselves rewarded with box-office success which kept on going. Would, say, The Last Detail be made now? Even more so, Electra Glide in Blue (1973)?

It has reappeared on disc in all its enigmatic glory well matched by Conrad Hall's photography of bright and remote Arizonian territory as well as interiors whose darkness matches the inhabitants' souls. Written by Robert Boris and directed by record producer James Guercio), it turns around a self-consciously short motor-cycle policeman (Robert Blake, who had appeared as the eponymous Tell Them Willie Boy is Here a few years earlier). On those lonely roads, he is able to issue tickets to those caught speeding. (One might recall that Nixon brought in speed limits, not from any environmental concern but for fear that Middle East supplies would dwindle amidst the turmoil there.) His partner in this regards it as a safe job but Blake aspires to more, to become a detective; an ambition fulfilled in an unexpected way which becomes all the more resonant when he takes a contrary view to that of the coroner (Royal Dano, who was to appear in Twin Peaks, as befits a man who, here, smokes while contemplating what the body's innards might tell); Blake believes that a man found dead in one of these remote houses was murdered.

Here is something which appears to be another of that era's road movies, mixed with a thriller - but all the while it is a meditation about man's place in an unforgiving landscape, one only complicated by the sultry, hip-swivelling presence of a bar-room's

Jeannine Riley. A significant twist is provided by another familiar scene from movies of that time: the police visit a gathering of harmless hippies and attempt to gain a rapport.

Such a film can have a wider effect than it might appear. William Boyd (whom Gore Vidal sometimes addressed as Willie Boy) recalls watching the film at the time: “it was the first film I saw where I began actually to analyse how it worked; the first film I saw where I became excited by the process of movie-making, the manipulation of image and mood, rather than responding to it as a straightforward intellectual and sensual stimulant”. One can perhaps see many reflections of its elliptical method in the short stories he began to publish a few years later – among them “On The Yankee Station”).

It is not too much to say that here is a depiction of a national state of mind ravaged by experience, and depiction, of events in Vietnam. One might hanker for a disc of its soundtrack – very Seventies – and even, inspired by its title, wonder how much a Harley-Davidson might now fetch: the model ridden by those two was called an Electra Blue.

Anybody who arrived late for The High Command in 1937 and, in stumbling across others' perhaps entangled, stockinged knees, may have looked up at the screen and - glimpsing the Art Deco furnishings, bobbed hair and smart jackets - assumed that this was an adulterous drama set in Mayfair.

Far from it.

Outside the clubhouse, as palm trees sway, drums beat to spur on wild dancing (untrammelled black breasts were deemed art by the Censor, who confined those of a white hue to clinging dresses). This is West Africa, where the British Army and Colonial Service are in awkward alliance (the former's territory is an island a mile or so offshore). From a novel by Lionel Robinson, which most likely nobody on earth is reading at this very moment, this was the first film directed by Thorold Dickinson who, alas, in a long life, made only eight more including the English incarnation of Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight and, best of all, Queen of Spades.

Thorold had been in films since the late-Twenties, visited America to study the emergent talkies and, on return to England, found himself in demand as an editor. Film is as much a world as any other in obliging one to grasp, or avoid, those opportunities which present themselves. At the time, and subsequently, some commentators have asserted that Dickinson should have given berth, rather than birth, to this project. One of those who understood its great merits was Graham Greene, whose Journey Without Maps showed a firm appreciation of the African landscape. In his review of the film for the magazine Night and Day that hot summer, he castigated the Sunday Times reviewer who had found it an additional soporific. As Greene said, anybody could find things to deride “in this picture, but a film critic should be capable of distinguishing, from the faults due to a poor story, an uncertain script and mere poverty [of funding], the very high promise of the direction”.

The story. That late-arriving cinemagoer in 1937 would also have missed the substantial prologue. Set amidst the Irish Rebellion of 1921, the sequence is a taut piece of work whose upshot is that it allowed one English officer, in the twilight, to shoot dead another who had previously made free with, even impregnating the woman now his wife. And so it seems, as the bullet does its job, all things must pass.

A doctor at the autopsy had his suspicions, but kept quiet the evidence which he retrieved from that sundered heart - and now finds himself in Africa, and in blackmailing proximity to that officer who is now a General (Lionel Atwill) who appears thankful of the opportunity to endorse at a bewigged Court Martial under the African sun that the murder was committed by another officer, one... James Mason, who, in one of his first rôles, utilises those full, arching eyebrows and burring voice to lifelong effect.

This is but part of it; there's no denying, as Greene said, it's script heavy (or, in his phrase, “slow, jerky, and obscure” - which is quite a concession by a novelist who professed to avoid adjectives, let alone laden, late-running 'buses of them, accurate as this one is). Greene highlights “one unfortunate scene of unconscious humour when a villainous trader about to placate his wife with a pearl necklace is interrupted by an unexplained woman in a similar pearl necklace who pops silently through a window, gives a dirty smile and pops out again, like the horse in Mr James Thurber's story which was always putting its head through the drawing-room curtains”. I too puzzled over that, and took her to be one of this husband's, shall we say, parallel amours.

There is no doubt that here is a ball of confusion. And yet, time and again, one is pulled away from such puzzlement. to delight in the wit of the film-making process, such as a foghorn in the distance when a General blows his nose. Imperfect, continually enjoyable.

The boarding house appears in many a film. Although the tall London house in Madame Sousatzka (1982) has in fact been divided into flats, it amounts to a boarding house, for the residents are in and out of each others' places much of the time. And what a household it is. At the centre - literally and figuratively - is the eponymous piano teacher (played by Shirley Maclaine); in the mouldering basement is Peggy Ashcroft as Lady Emily, down on her luck - there is even a cardboard box labelled Distressed Gentlefolk); Geoffrey Bayldon, who plies a perilous trade as a masseur, has also known better times while, in a room at the top, Twiggy lives in hopes of them while a music agent played by Leigh Lawson avails himself of her.

Richly decorated - a lifetime's souvenirs squeezed into such rooms -, events move at a pace as Shirley Maclaine takes on a promising teenage Indian pupil (Navin Chowdry) whose young single mother (an inspired Shabana Azmi) prepares catering food from their flat in a suburban house. Directed by John Schlesinger from a script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who adapted Bernice Rubens's novel), it all moves at a pace even when lingering upon the lessons which are as much a performance for the reminiscent teacher as her pupil at the keyboard. Hers is a tragic history, a matter of loss, which includes pupils who do not want to bide their time but succumb to other blandishments - as looks set to be the case when Twiggy's agent chances to scent greater rewards in the pianist than anything offered by her flop single.

Here is terrific ensemble playing, down to the small parts taken by a dodgy developer who prevails upon a local official to deem the place uninhabitable. The marauding early Eighties are caught so well, the place festooned with estate-agent boards (the names are invented, as is the firm Bream painted upon the side of the obligatory skip).

In fact Bernice Rubens's novel was published twenty years earlier (and drew upon some of her own life as part of a musical family and letting out rooms herself in her London house). High time to catch up with her work.

In some ways, the Sixties were D. H. Lawrence's most successful decade. The end of the Chatterley ban brought a huge readership for the extraordinary amount he had written, against the odds, in the first thirty years of the twentieth century before his death from tuberculosis. Amidst this Sixties boom there were films of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love (a medium which evidently interested him, to judge by his depiction of it in The Lost Girl).

Perhaps less remembered is that the Sixties ended with a film of his novella The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970). This film, whose script was an early work by Alan Pater, did well in its time, an image from it appearing upon a slim Penguin edition of the novella. Lawrence, who never saw the story in print, had been inspired to write it after staying in the mid-Twenties Midlands after a return from Taos on the way to Italy. That Derbyshire sojourn brought him in contact with his wife Frieda's children by her first husband: a fraught household which inspired the one in the novella which finds a vicar still embittered by the departure of his wife. Once Lawrence and Frieda reached Italy, they were visited by her daughter Barbara (known as Barby); she and Lawrence got on well, and his story about a frustrated young woman forbidden to meet men took shape.

Although circumstances prevented the novella's appearing in Lawrence's lifetime (he was never one to linger but got on with the next work), it was praised on publication soon after his death. Vita Sackville-West wrote of “the extraordinary, sensuous beauty which nobody but Lawrence could quite encompass”; Arnold Bennett saw that “Lawrence is as easily and perfectly at home in an English rectory as in a gypsy encampment. Short the book is; but it has in it fundamental stuff for a novel three times its length. This is a work to keep and read thrice.”

A short book can make for a successful film (there being less vexation about a need to discard material by which viewers might set great store). Put simply, Joanna Shimkus, as Yvette (inspired by Frieda's daughter Barby) returns with her sister after a jaunt South to her father (Maurice Denham)'s rectory, where, after his wife's departure and divorce, he is attended by his sour sister (Fay Walsh) and mind-wandering mother (Fay Compton). Not to mention local scandal caused by a marvellous Honor Blackman as one of couple who are, in that great phrase, “living in sin”.

This claustrophobia is perfectly caught by director Christopher Miles (a key moment being a row about closing a window).

As Lawrence wrote, “they had been to a good girls' school, and had had a finishing year in Lausanne, and were quite the usual thing, tall young creatures with fresh sensitive faces and bobbed hair and young-manly, deuce-take-it manners”. Oddly, in the film, their hair is not bobbed but falls upon the shoulders as if they had just been strolling along the King's Road of Swinging London. No matter, the atmosphere is well sustained as a motor-car jaunt brings them to the fireside gypsy encampment, fortune-telling and all the deep-rooted yearnings which are a far cry from passing the tea cups to visitors at four o'clock by the hearth.

The wonder remains is that there is so much more by Lawrence - such as the long story “Daughters of the Vicar” - which has never been filmed. As shown by The Virgin and the Gypsy, his work can give all members of a cast their due rather than being made subservient to those temporarily at the peak of a star-driven system.

“You're not my father, you're a public monument!” So shouts Odile Verosis at David Kossoff who is Ambassador in Fifties London for an East European country. Both of them have survived a war in which wife and mother died. The situation remains tense, so much so that she was seen sobbing while going on her own to watch Swan Lake at Covent Garden. That man (David Knight) at her side hastens to catch up with her as she leaves the auditorium.

Of course, the title - The Young Lovers (1954) - reveals what swiftly ensues, and it gives little away to reveal that this is another variant on Romeo and Juliet: he works in a coding department at the American Embassy. Directed by Anthony Asquith from a script by George Tabori, this is a curiously little-known film (it does not make it into any film guide I have to hand), and yet it keeps one's attention throughout. Although there are brightly-lit scenes of London thoroughfares, complete with high-platformed taxis, this is mainly a work of interiors: paradoxically, the Eastern European premises are dark and spacious, their high ceilings requiring deep shots which are a contrast with the utilitarian American set-up (where Joan Sims pops up as a switchboard operator, a previously unknown figure at the heart of the Cold War).

It is bold stuff for its time. Somehow, in the middle of London waves are seen to crash on a rocky shore between the shot in which they kiss and the one that finds her wearing only a slip upon his bed. Evidently the city moved for them.

How will it turn out? These passions can only erupt, unleashing the high drama of the last third. This is edge-of-the-seat, edge-of-the-Coast stuff: well worth your time.

“Let's go to work!” The phrase is of course associated with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Was he, though, as an assiduous viewer, alluding to Bullets or Ballots (1936)? The phrase is uttered by one of a bunch of gangsters who command numerous rackets, including the pinball machines which they foist upon a café owner as the pupils at the opposite school will not be able to resist it.

A politician who vows to stop all this is felled by Humphrey Bogart, whose maverick behaviour shows that the gang is riven while only one of them knows the sleekly respectable-looking Mr. Bigs behind it all.

How will Edward G. Robinson be able to enforce the law and prevent the series of front pages which were, of course, such a rapid-fire part of these fast-moving Warner Brothers movies?

Capably directed by William Keighley, it is well done, “a good gangster film of the second class”, as Graham Greene said at the time - and added that Robinson's mouth was “more than ever like a long slit in a pillar-box”. One might wonder how much Greene's watching of such films influenced Brighton Rock, a feature of which is those who stand aloof from slugfests while gaining from them.

There are two musical interludes in San Quentin (1937). One of these finds Ann Sheridan on stage in a night club. Of the other - a rendition of “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” -, well, I shall not reveal any more except to say that here is another of those tremendous Warner Brothers movies so hard boiled that one relishes the shell cracking as these sixty-seven minutes move relentlessly to a tragic conclusion.

Ann Sheridan is sister of Bogart who, since adolescence, has fallen in with a bad lot and done time in Reformatory and gaol before landing back there for ten years. As chance has it, she finds that in her bar's audience is a man - Pat O'Brien - who becomes smitten by her just as he is about to be seconded from the Army to take charge of the gaol.

Which is quite a complication - all the more so as he is decent man who likes to see the best in all but the worst (the latter he reckons to be a distinct minority). Even so, he is up against the inmates' hierarchy, a pecking order way beyond the cage of any henhouse. Alongside many a hemmed-in scene (cell; office) there are several on a parade ground where a careless taunt can bring brawls - including one by a prisoner who has turned, vocally, to the Bible, and snaffles a gun to prove his point (blessed are the rifles, one might almost say).

Much of this is owed to a taut screenplay sharpened by another Humphrey: Humphrey Cobb. He died a few years later, and would gain wider recognition when Stanley Kubrick filmed a novel based on his Great War experience: Paths of Glory.

It had been too long since watching Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977), in which time it does not figure - one finds – in the knowledge of many who try to be sedulous in foraging through ever-proliferating screen fare. It is now, though, on DVD, with different labels offering a variety of extras.

How, though, does this film which has shimmered in the memory strike one when shown in its vanilla version? That was the form in which people were first surprised by it over forty years ago when explanatory matter was scant (and this usage of vanilla unknown). Put simply, pig-tailed Sissy Spacek, looking younger than her years, has fled from Texas and arrives for a job helping invalids at a Californian spa on the desert's edge. Here, she is guided by a colleague Shelley Duvall, who shows her such things as the strictly-checked time-clock and gives instructions in the art, or mechanics, of getting wobbly people into the hot pools.

It feels a prison from which daily escape is welcome. Altman depicts the Californian exteriors with relish. And yet this corner of the State soon becomes as much a trap. To use a current phrase, it is peopled by weirdos and misfits, some of whom haunt a bar run by Janice Rule, who also owns the poolside apartment block where Shelley Winters has a small place and has offered the extra bed in her room to Sissy Spacek (which the expectation she will adjourn to the rollaway when necessary).

These two have, of course, distinctive faces which suit these two hours' heightened reality (Sissy Spacek had been so effective in Badlands and Carrie). Shelley Winters affects bravura, suggesting that men are there for her asking, especially if she has dinners for which she creates some of the grimmest food ever to appear on screen

(cheese was injured by the nozzle of aerosol cans in the making of this film). With Sissy Spacek much put upon, life's shadow darkens in the sunshine; a counterpoint to which is Janice Rule's painting of strange murals upon many a surface.

What do all the details mean? Why does Shelley Winters's yellow dress always get trapped by the door of her open-top automobile? There is more happening here than one can take in, and yet it is never frustrating, but tantalising, as events take a tragic parabola, in effect a road movie which stays in one spot.

And what a delight to see again Ruth Nelson, who, prominent in New York theatre in the Thirties, had not appeared in films for three decades until the previous year's now-elusive The Late Show with Lily Tomlin. She was to appear again in an Altman film, 1978's glorious ensemble work A Wedding, which has also now escaped general viewing.

Altman himself was to endure eclipse. Buoyed by the success of Mash, he found himself carried on that wave of a new Hollywood which yielded such things as One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Night Moves and All the President's Men until running into 1978 and the Star Wars buffers. Altman kept working, and was, after a while, to find new general, sleek success with The Player and Gosford Park while Short Cuts and Cookie's Fortune were truer to his earlier spirit.

Startling to think that he has now been dead fifteen years. It still feels as he is with us, for his varied approach to film making ensures that he is not stuck in time. Not only is there an urge to watch again the little-known Images but also to seek out the Criterion Collection disc of 3 Women - an American issue - which contains his detailed director's commentary. Nobody, even Altman, ever made a film quite like this, even if - the three women being one - some claim that this is a West Coast Persona.

Here is a film with added resonance in our era of savouring the sight and sound of bird life amidst the encircling chaos of pandemic and climate emergency. What's more, if one missed the first few frames of Tawny Pipet (1944) one could easily take this for an Ealing production. Here we are in the wartime countryside, somewhere in Gloucestershire. A fighter pilot (Niall MacGinnis) recovers from injuries, accompanied by his nurse (Rosamund John). They are turning this enforced leisure to account by rambling the hills around the village and taking the opportunity to enjoy a shared hobby of bird-watching.

To their delight they chance upon a pair of the eponymous creatures which have not been seen upon these shores for some time. What's more, these ground-nesting birds are protecting some eggs.

Such are ornithological circles that news of the discovery spreads within the village and, ominously, beyond. The villagers are united in protecting the avian visitors and their potential offspring. An open-air meeting is addressed to that effect by wheelchair-bound Colonel Barton-Barrington, played by Bernard Miles who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Charles Saunders.

With the village setting, and a gathering of such types as a schoolteacher, mischievous but good-hearted children, a vicar, a publican, one is reminded of, among other things, Went the Day Well? a year before. Tawny Pipet is equally well photographed. Some might deem it sentimental but there is a tough edge, it springs surprises (including Julian Huxley in the credits alongside the two birds who did such stirring stuff).

Has there ever been quite such a confrontation with a tank? The very vehicle itself appears to back off, such is Rosamund John's passionate reason. And as surreal a moment as a Russian who, on a propaganda mission, regales the villagers from the back of a truck with tales of how she herself felled hundreds of Germans? Far from the hodge-podge this might sound, the film has a compulsive glowing logic which can fell the cynical from forty paces.

As indeed it did James Agee when it reached New York a few years later. “It is an almost unimaginably genteel picture, and if you had, as it were, to sit in the same parlor with it, you would probably suffer a good deal. But at this comfortable distance in blood as well as space, I was able, rather to my dismay, to take all this extreme Englishness almost in the spirit in which it was offered...in spite of its profuse cuteness and genteelism, it has a good deal of genuine charm, humor, and sweetness of temper.”